Project Alpha Sigma
by Dayja
Summary: Tony was Howard Stark's greatest creation. He meant that very literally. And now the Avengers have a forty year old child on their team. And it turns out, they had always had a child on their team. Can they fix Tony? And does he even need to be fixed?
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own/am not associated with/make no money from the Avengers.

Warnings: This story includes references to underage sex, both because Tony started young and for a slightly more horrific reason that will become clear in the story but relates to his de-aging. There is no graphic, in text descriptions of sex in this story. There's also underage drinking, child endangerment, and what is technically, in hindsight, the torture and abuse of a child. The story will address these things but for the most part as things of the past. Also there will be some mention of fertility issues.

There will also be some cuteness to go with the angst. I promise.

**It Begins**

He had the best of intentions. It wasn't really his experiment to begin with. He had nothing to do with the malformed, horribly wrong _things_ left floating in tubes or squirming grotesquely in their containment pens. In fact, Howard was part of the team that shut the project down. It was the sort of project that induced nightmares and showed every reason why such projects should never ever make their way beyond the hypothetical if they even went that far.

In fact, it was because he was avoiding the mass killing (not killing, disposal, those things had no true life, it was a kindness to terminate them) going on in the main labs that he instead looked into the numbers and equations and DNA that had gone into the project. He had a drink in his hands. Anyone who had seen the labs would need a drink after that.

It wasn't his fault that he was a genius, even if this was outside his usual field of expertise, even if the second drink made the world a bit fuzzy. It wasn't his fault that he had, in fact, been researching genetics as part of a personal project; something to turn tragedy and failure into numbers and equations, until all he could see was the science, not his wife's pain, not her flat stomach, not the empty cradle. It wasn't his fault that he could now see the abstract of what was being attempted. It wasn't his fault that he saw how it could work, be improved upon. That he understood the missing piece of the puzzle that had eluded all those other inhuman scientists because it took humanity to see it. They had wanted monsters, filling in gaps in the degraded DNA with monsters, and it hadn't worked, of course not, the results more sad than anything. It wasn't his field, personal projects aside, but Howard had always been a fast learner and he excelled in seeing how different parts fit together.

When he pricked his finger and entered his own DNA into the machine, the machine already set up, humming and waiting, he was just going to see if the blending worked. He wasn't going to actually grow the thing. He wasn't Frankenstein; he had principles. He did.

And it did work. But what he hadn't quite realized about the machine was that it wasn't designed to work in hypotheticals. Once it had the data, the machine did what it had been designed to do. And suddenly Howard had a new life, and it was tiny, too tiny to see, little more than a bundle of cells, but it was real. He could have ended it. Just by not touching the tiny glass tube that the machine had produced, the life would have had no way to grow. He could have smashed it right then. But then he really would have been killing it. It was alive. He could feel that it had worked. A human perfectly blended with an alien. Not just any human. A Stark.

Howard smuggled the glass tube out of the building. It wasn't difficult.

He told himself he was saving a life that would have been unduly terminated. He told himself that he had no intentions of using the information the embryo could give in the same way the scientists who created the technology had intended. Even if the child did turn out to be some kind of super soldier, Howard wasn't so out of touch with morality as to think that literally growing an army was in any way a good idea. He told himself that it was his duty as a scientist to discover what sort of being might grow. He told himself it was a way to give Maria what she had always wanted. He told himself many things.

He never quite admitted, not even in the most secret corners of his own mind, that maybe he had wanted a child. That ever since he got the news that having a child was impossible he had felt a cold ache somewhere inside. At most, he admitted to wanting a legacy.

Maria never asked questions when he told her they could have a baby. Howard never questioned whether this was a bad idea. Never mind the risks, that he didn't really know what kind of creature he was implanting inside her. Never mind that he had seen the results of the mistakes with his own eyes. It was his and it would be theirs. He believed in his own equations so hard that there wasn't room for things like doubt.

The baby was born ten and a half months later. There was no hospital, no birth certificate, no extravagant celebration welcoming the newest Stark into the world. The baby was born in secret with only Maria and Howard present and a team of highly discrete, highly paid doctors standing by outside the door and out of sight and, as there were no complications, ultimately never being told why they had been called to wait.

The baby looked human, small and pale and white with black fuzz on its head. It had Howard's features. Its eyes were something alien, something not quite right. Its ears were pointed, just enough to be noticeable. Maria smiled and called it Tony. Howard beamed. He named it Alpha Sigma for his case study and set about taking measurements.

He knew he was right. This was nothing like those monstrosities in the lab. This was perfect.

It wasn't until subject Alpha Sigma reached thirty six months that the first concern became apparent. In fact, it first showed up as something to watch at twenty six months and four days when certain measurements came back as virtually unchanged for the third measuring in a row.

Howard wasn't unduly concerned that the subject was registering only a slight increase of height and weight for three weeks, unusual though this may be in human infants. Subject Alpha Sigma wasn't human, after all, or at least not entirely, for all he looked like a healthy two year old boy.

"He's not growing; why isn't he growing?" Maria demanded, desperate and concerned while they watched the boy babble in baby talk to himself while carefully stacking colored blocks.

"He'll get a growth spurt soon," Howard insisted. But the boy didn't grow, or not very much. Then he wasn't two anymore, he was three years old, and suddenly subject Alpha Sigma wasn't just late hitting normal developmental mile stones, he was severely behind. He didn't just look the same at three as he had at two; he still acted like a two year old.

It wasn't that he wasn't smart and nor was it that he was clumsy. In fact, he was ahead of other children his age when it came to putting together puzzles or arranging shapes by size. The child had a natural grace and was much more at home in his body than a normal three year old. Howard speculated that this was at least partly due to the fact that most three year olds had to deal with a constantly growing body. Subject Alpha Sigma just wasn't growing.

He also had several cognitive delays, particularly with speech and social skills. It wasn't just that he wasn't really talking; he wasn't interacting properly with other people.

"It's because he isn't socializing," Maria insisted, "He should be playing with other children."

"Do you know what will happen if anyone learns he exists?" Howard demanded. Maria didn't, not really. As far as she knew, he was a revolutionary experiment in fertilization. If she ever suspected, if she ever ran her fingers over those pointed ears or looked into the alien eyes, she never said a word about it. She never commented that he didn't have any of her features, even though she was the one who carried him. She was his mother and that was that.

"So don't invite the parents," she said then, adamant that her Tony would not be isolated and hidden forever. "Who's going to listen to a toddler? Anyway, he can't stay hidden in a lab all his life; he's our son! You're his father, do something! Fix something so no one will notice if he's different. One of your ridiculous camouflage toys or something."

Howard went into his lab. He was on the edge of the future and peering beyond with the help of alien artefacts. Sometimes, he thought maybe he wasn't doing anything at all, that he had never done any of it. That there was something alive in the soft alien glow, something that wanted out. It was an easy excuse for why he created project Alpha Sigma. Being a father was enough of an excuse for what he made next. It would protect his son.

He had the best of intentions.

"It isn't a hologram," he told his wife later, years later in fact, while she stared at her son in wonder, running her fingers over his rounded ears, looking into eyes that very much resembled her own. Tony looked perfectly happy and content after the shock of the injection wore off, not at all like he was in pain or even aware of the change. "It's like if you take a negative and then make a photo of that negative," Howard continues, "only then you make some changes to the photo. And the negative is still there, but the photo is the real part, it's the part the world touches and sees. Alpha Sigma will grow now, you'll see, just like any other boy."

"His name is Tony," Maria scolds him with a playful shove. It's a long standing joke between them that started, as many jokes start, as a heated argument. In Howard's notes, he would always be Alpha Sigma. It was a way to protect him, as much as it had started as a way for Howard to protect himself.

Protecting himself from loving his own projects had never worked.

When project Alpha Sigma turned seven, he was roughly one inch taller than when he turned three. He had the vocabulary of a three year old, the social and emotional maturity of a two year old, the problem solving skills of a twelve year old and the math skills of an undergraduate.

He was introduced to the world as Anthony Edward Stark, age two, complete with birth certificate and heavily altered baby photos to prove it. Anthony Edward Stark continued to have speech delays up to six years of age when his many speech therapists' work finally paid off and he started speaking like any other six year old.

Anthony Edward Stark grew like a normal human child from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Intellectually he was a genius. In just about every other way, Howard was distressed to find he still acted with the maturity of a young child. "Grow up," he tried to tell him, almost desperately. It came out harsh. The child with Maria's eyes glared back.

Howard told himself that his son was smart. He told himself that his intellect more than made up for his maturity. (He tried not to look too hard in the mirror to find out if that was true.) He told himself that his son needed a solid future and sure protection more than he needed coddling and playtime. He didn't mean to hold his son at arm's length but there was a part of him always waiting and watching, looking for the parts that were alien to shine through. Besides, Howard was a busy man. He had a business and projects to run. Tony had his mother. Tony had schools. One day, Tony would have everything that Howard could give him. Howard just had to build it first.

When Anthony Edward Stark was fifteen, he had sex for the first time. Because he was in a, for once age typical, rebellious stage, he was not particularly discrete. His parents found out. The whole world found out. Howard tried to console himself that the serum had worked, that it had even managed to send Tony through puberty and towards adulthood. He tried to console Maria by reminding her that Tony was really twenty years old, that he wasn't as young as he looked. Maria asked him how old he would look if he didn't have Howard's magical serum.

"He's just a baby, Howard," she cried, "He's a baby wrapped in a grown up body and he isn't ready. Talk to him."

Howard shouted at him. "You're a Stark!" he said. "You're ruining your reputation! My reputation!" he said. "You're underage and I'm worried about you!" he didn't say.

"You told me to grow up," Tony answered. Howard didn't know whether to be proud or furious. In the end he stepped back and added more notes to Alpha Sigma's file. The scientist in him remained fascinated by this development and he hated himself a little for it.

Howard called him his greatest creation, but never so Tony could hear. He never told anyone what Tony really was, not even Tony himself. And then Howard died, and Maria died, and that was really the end of project Alpha Sigma for all that Tony lived. It should have been the end. For a long long time, it was.

**Author Notes**: So...this is in response to this prompt which you can find at AO3 since they allow links.

I've written about five chapters thus far but it is a Work-in-progress (unless it's marked as complete, in which case this note is old, so ignore it). So I should be able to give fairly quick updates up to then, after which I make no promises. Apparently about five chapters is how long I'm able to hold out until the lure of feedback is too strong and I must start posting. I meant to at least hold off on this one until I finished the Monster Fighters, but since I've had about half the next chapter in that story written for months now and can't seem to find where I'm going with it well enough to write more...well, I might as well start a new story in the meantime. So...hope you enjoy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Twenty Years Later**

Tony Stark swirled his drink around his glass, looked into the mirror, and frowned. He was getting old. He still felt the same at nearly forty as he had at twenty, but the face that looked back at him was not that of a twenty year old. It wasn't aged or decrepit either. Maybe the lines were slightly deeper, the shadows under his eyes more pronounced. He definitely had more facial hair. There were no gray hairs, not yet. He just looked…stretched. Weathered. This was a face that had endured. It didn't matter how many moisturizers he used, how carefully he groomed himself, or even, if he felt the situation called for it, what cosmetics he put on. It wasn't that his skin was hard or wrinkled or anything of the kind; it just had a feel of being long used. Haunted, is what he avoided thinking.

He ran his fingers through his hair, his fingers lightly brushing over his ear. It was a habit he had picked up from his mother. She was always running her fingers over his ears. He found it comforting in ways he'd never be able to admit to. He had had to make sure whatever hair style he had allowed for the small gesture or it'd never last the night.

"Tony, stop admiring yourself in the mirror," a voice called from the other room, "You look pretty, I promise. And we don't want to be late to your own fundraiser."

"If it's my fundraiser, it shouldn't start until I get there," Tony answered, an old argument that never worked.

"Your mother's fundraiser, then," the voice answered, and oh, that was playing dirty, that was cheating. Tony really should be frowning harder but he found his lips quirking up instead, smiling in his eyes, and at least ten years of age simply vanished from his face. Tony might be getting old but he wasn't old yet.

"Dirty tactics, Miss Potts," Tony said, leaving the bathroom at last.

"I've learned from the best," Pepper answered, giving him a raised eyebrow while he took the time to take in her formfitting dress and the way her necklace framed her throat, glittering like stars.

"Rogers," Tony agreed, nodding sagely, and Pepper stuck out her tongue, slapping him lightly on his upper arm.

"Come on," she said and then, just when Tony could imagine her body fitting against his, warm and comfortable and fun, she pulled away. "We're going to be late."

As an expert Tony wrangler, it only took her another ten minutes to drag him into the car.

The car ride, rather to Tony's disappointment, was not spent in any intimate fashion. For one thing, Pepper seemed more inclined to remind Tony of the proper way to behave. For another, it turned out they weren't alone in the car. This would not, generally, dissuade Tony from intimate gestures but somehow Pepper had wound up sat between Rogers and Romanoff and even Tony wasn't stupid enough to try and reach over Romanoff. At least not more than once.

"Why are we all smushed into one car?" he demanded after that one attempt failed dismally. "I'm rich; we can afford more than one car."

"We aren't all in one car," Rogers answered, "Clint, Bruce, and Thor aren't here."

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Rogers aka Captain Obvious," Tony answered, and even managed not to snicker at being able to call him 'Mr. Rogers'. "I still want to know why we have to smush when I have several other perfectly good cars you could come in."

"You wish we were smushed," Natasha answered, giving him the same raised eyebrow he'd received from Pepper earlier. Tony tried and failed not to grin in response. She did have a point though. The limo could have been called many things but cramped wasn't one of them.

"Clint, Bruce, and Thor aren't coming," Pepper said helpfully if belatedly, offering Rogers a smile that didn't make Tony feel a bit jealous at all. The statement also wasn't entirely true. Bruce always got to bail on these events by playing the 'I might turn into a giant green rage monster and hurt people' card. Barton, however, was joining them…just not officially. In fact he was already there. Any event that had half the Avengers attending was a magnet for trouble.

Thor, of course, could have come, but was considered too 'unsubtle' to act in the same capacity as Barton and probably too unsubtle to even act in the capacity of the rest of the Avengers. At any rate, once he had understood the basic purpose of the function, he had decided that he had had enough of banquets for the moment and offered to keep Bruce company. Whether he actually didn't want to go or whether he was trying to be a good friend to Bruce wasn't clear.

In hindsight, they could have done with having Thor, and Bruce for that matter.

In current-sight, Tony was vaguely glad the car wasn't even more crowded while at the same time vaguely thinking it would be nice if he could science with Bruce instead of partying with Rogers. As for the rest of the car's occupants…he could never regret the presence of two beautiful ladies.

"Honestly, Tony," Pepper said when, five minutes later Tony somehow found himself attempting to reach over Romanoff and was now nursing a sore finger. He swears he didn't intend to, that he did have some self-control. It's just that Pepper had been quietly showing Rogers something on her phone and laughing and he found himself reaching out for that smile as though he could somehow hold onto it. "You're the oldest one here and you act like a two year old."

"Am not," Tony answered in most definitely not the exact tone a two year old might answer in. "Rogers is way older, aren't you gramps?" Steve, rather than getting offended, just smiled slightly as though amused and didn't even bother answering.

"And Thor is…like…a millennia old," Tony continued, slightly annoyed at the lack of response and trying to ignore the fact that technically Pepper was right. Unless you counted the time Cap spent as a capsicle, and assuming Natasha was the age she appeared to be (and it's never safe to assume with Romanoff, but Tony did have enough self-preservation not to approach women about their ages), Tony was anything from a few years to a couple decades older than everyone in the car. If Tony had to bring up people who weren't even there to make himself feel younger that wasn't pathetic, it was good tactical sense.

"You know, I've talked to Thor about that," Steve said, still smiling in an obnoxious fashion, "by Asgard standards, he's really barely out of his teens. They age more slowly than humans or something."

"And how old does that make Loki?" Tony demanded, using his wise maturity to ignore the way Pepper and Romanoff were both definitely smirking at him.

"I didn't think it a good idea to ask," Steve answered, giving Tony another raised eyebrow look.

"What? Why? We could totally use that info if he ever tries to conquer the Earth again."

"Why didn't I ask Thor invasive questions about his lost brother?" Steve asked, still giving Tony a look.

"What?" Tony asked, looking from person to person and their equally exasperated looks. Luckily, before anyone could find any more ways to be exasperated or to make remarks about Tony's age or for Pepper to give Rogers another smile, they arrived.

There is a misconception when it comes to Tony, public affairs, and masks. Some people assume that behind his smooth and shallow public persona, there's the sweet but slightly bashful genius with no self-esteem who hates publicity affairs. Others assume that Tony is his playboy image and that there're no masks at all.

Neither is quite true. Tony does have a public mask for facing such public affairs. He just doesn't hate having to don that mask. If anything, he revels in his role as the center of everyone's attention, quite often in all the wrong ways. He loves the game, he loves the rush, and he absolutely loves bending the world to his own whim.

Afghanistan may have forced him to grow up, in a sense, and to finally accept that 'bad attention' is not always better than 'no attention at all', but just as there was more to Tony than his public mask, there was also more to Tony than his Avenger mask or even his engineer mask. Because the best sort of mask is one that shows something real.

Tony doesn't hate parties and galas and banquets. He hates being ignored and he hates being bored. Unfortunately, speeches tend to result in both, which is why he used to bail on ceremonies to find his own entertainment.

Luckily for all, the fundraiser was more of a mix-and-mingle kind of party than a stand-still-and-listen-to-someone-speak-who-isn't-Tony sort of party. So Tony was having fun talking to people, drinking, dancing, and basically being the center, if not of the universe, then at least of the room while side stepping invasive questions or questing hands. Watching Steve shifting uncomfortably while beautiful women tried to chat him up was nothing short of hilarious. Demanding ridiculous foods and drinks from the 'waiter' Clint was another level of amusement, even if said 'waiter' did keep managing to sabotage Tony's drink orders with something far less alcoholic. Watching Natasha work the room was like watching an artist.

Watching Pepper was somewhat less fun, even if none of the smiles she was giving away were her _real_ smiles. Still, Tony was an adult. He knew how to behave himself. He also knew how to have fun.

So of course that's when the mad godling crashed the party. Like all mad villains, the crashing part was literal. Subtlety is not part of the mad villainy handbook. So one second Tony had the attention of three young socialites and at least five more people hanging back but listening when the skylights were raining glass and people were screaming and crawling under tables or running for the door or, in the case of one young lady, swooning dramatically into Steve's arms. And people called _Tony_ an attention seeker.

There were four avengers and one of Loki. Unfortunately, only Natasha had her proper weapons on her. Steve had opted not to carry the shield in with him, Clint couldn't easily stow his favorite weapon while serving drinks, and while Tony was not suit-less, he was wearing his less powerful but more portable version. They were missing two of their real power hitters completely.

Still, four Avengers with minimum arsenal might have been just enough.

"You do know Thor's not here, right?" Tony demanded as his suit finished surrounding him, pulling Loki's attention while the less armored heroes tried to herd the completely non-powered guests out the doors before someone got hurt. He carefully didn't turn his head in Pepper's direction where he had seen her dive under a table.

"I don't need Thor for a fight!" Loki answered, sounding somehow superior and sulky at the same time.

"Whatever you say, jailbait," Tony answered, a witty statement that would have had a much greater impact if Loki had actually understood the reference. He followed up his words with a repulsor blast that did absolutely nothing beyond breaking Loki's illusion and the wall behind it.

Then Loki was right behind him, because of course he was; it was one of the first rules of fighting that if you can't see the enemy they're right behind you. Realizing this didn't stop Tony from being too slow to dodge the sudden blast of cold energy that knocked him across the room. Immediately alarms started to go off inside the helmet, which would have been more informative if the suit hadn't decided to reveal its inferiority to his regular suits by having the helmet respond to the kinetic force and fly free. That was the danger of a quick on, quick off suit…sometimes it chose the wrong moment to be 'quick off'.

His armor was breached, his helmet completely gone, he was lying on the ground where Loki's blast had thrown him, and he could just see in the reflection of a conveniently placed plate that Loki was raising his hands for a second blast. This did not look good.

It was, luckily, the exact moment when Tony would have been history that a spinning disk which strongly resembled a shield but was, in fact, a drinks tray crashed into Loki's arms with enough force to break a human's bones. Unfortunately, Loki was not human and he was wearing armor. It did at least stop him from blasting Tony.

"You!" cried Loki, a murderous look in his eyes as he turned to Steve. Then that look morphed into a cruel smirk. "You're the one who used a potion to become strong. I have a gift for you, and another for your green friend." And he was reaching to his belt for something, something that glowed, and in the Avengers' experience nothing good came from things that glowed.

"You shouldn't have," Steve answered, standing tall and fearless but also shieldless. So when Loki threw the glowing thing in Steve's direction, everyone reacted. Clint's bullets didn't work, because bullets never seem to work anymore and Natasha's attempt to take Loki down mid throw didn't stop him, and Tony's repulsor blast was about as useful as Clint's bullets. Or rather, all these things did make the glowing thing go off target, but it swung back around on its own accord like a Steve seeking missile. Steve dodged, of course, and threw another tray at it, but it was fast and it was coming for him and none of their efforts were going to be enough to stop it.

Then Tony got in its way. His hope was that his armor would protect him. It didn't.

The glowing light shattered into him and it was like plunging into ice, it was like sand and shrapnel and his heart being torn apart. There was a scream, high pitched and painful and ear shattering, and Tony fell into darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

"Tell us how to reverse this curse, brother!"

"I don't know! I didn't do it!" At the outraged looks his captors were giving him, Loki reluctantly decided to offer more information. "…Okay, literally speaking my enchantment did in fact change him…but it shouldn't have. It is meant to strip a person of their enhancements; if a person had no such enhancements then nothing should have happened. I think the question is, why are you disguising children as warriors and sending them into battle?"

Loki looked truly outraged and put out at this. His captors might have thought this act another one of his tricks, but Thor knew his brother well enough to know his brother's soft spot when it came to children. Besides, the only reason they managed to defeat Loki in the first place was because he had actually frozen in shock at the sight of the small child screaming from inside Iron Man's armor.

They had all frozen for a moment. There's something highly disturbing about a small child screaming in pain, and the fact that the small child then stopped screaming, and moving…

And then Pepper managed to crawl out from under a table, march right past all of Loki's magical defenses and bash him on the head with her shoe. This was followed by Natasha electrocuting him. Then Thor showed up and the battle was basically over.

Still, SHIELD wasn't putting it past Loki to have faked that shock and let himself be captured for some unknown purpose. The fact remained that they had a very small child in the place of Tony Stark, and that kind of de-aging doesn't just happen.

It would have been simpler if it was just a child Tony. A human Tony with no arc reactor and no shrapnel who just needed a babysitter while the other Avengers sorted it out and made him grow up again. This child who looked around four years old, and a young four at that, had pointed ear tips, alien DNA, and an arc reactor that was far too big on his tiny body. It also had shrapnel, shrapnel that had ripped through old scar tissue as said tissue had shrunk around it. It was a miracle he had lived long enough to have surgery, let alone that he survived the surgery itself. There were so many ways it should have gone wrong. The human blood they had on reserve might have been rejected, considering they later discovered the body they were working on wasn't entirely human. The extensive damage to his body, to his lungs, to his heart should have torn him apart from the inside out.

Tony was still in surgery when an analysis of his blood came back with 'not quite human'. The doctors had come to much the same conclusion when they went in to try and fix the pulverized heart. It wasn't so much that Tony had two hearts as that his single heart looked a bit like two that had been welded together. One half was torn through with shrapnel, half crushed beneath where the arc reactor had been before they had removed it. The other half beat strongly. The rest of his organs were…wrong. Not that the doctors were taking the time to examine them, just that they knew what a chest cavity should look like and, damage aside, there was something off. And his body was trying to heal itself. The damaged half of the heart stopped gushing blood even as the doctors scrambled to set up a bypass, as though the body had realized it was a loss and was sealing off the broken bits to save the rest.

While nurses and doctors stared in confusion at the anatomical puzzle before them, the head surgeon looked at the steadily beating muscle, the shriveled remains of its other half, and the way tiny bits of shrapnel broke away to fly up to the magnet still held in place over the chest cavity.

"Cut away the dead heart," she decided, "And we clear out the shrapnel. All of it."

There were a hundred ways Tony should have died. Between the damage and the unfamiliar anatomy, a mistake should have been made somewhere or the damage should have just been too much for his tiny body to handle.

Twenty four hours later, he was still alive. The shrapnel and arc reactor were gone. So were half his heart and a quarter of his lungs. The massive hole in his chest was covered but not fully repaired.

The team was allowed to visit one at a time. No one argued when Pepper went in first.

"Tony," she whispered to the sleeping child. He looked so tiny. Despite the many tubes and machines surrounding him, his face looked almost untouched. If Tony had ever had a son, he might have looked like this child. But this wasn't Tony's son; this was Tony, her Tony. It didn't quite fit into her head, that her Tony and this Tony could be the same person. Her Tony was an adult, an adult who drank alcohol and loved sex and flew around in a metal suit and saved the world. This Tony was far too young for any of that. She felt a bit sick even thinking about sex and this boy in the same thought.

They had to fix this. Pepper had no intentions of being a mother and Tony… Tony would hate this. Hate the limitations, hate the way the world would look down upon him, hate the memories that being a child again would surely conjure up, memories of his cold and distant father, his loving but now dead mother.

"It will be okay," Pepper whispered to him, fingers lightly gliding over a strand of his hair, lightly brushing against his ear.

Then she got up and let the others have their chance to look in on him.

In another room, Fury was looking at a picture of a double, alien heart. He was frowning at it. Then he looked at the picture of Tony's heart.

"Damn, Howard, what did you do?" he demanded of the air. The man had been dead around twenty years and he was still giving Fury problems.

If he had been a completely human child, assuming he hadn't died by that point, he'd probably have continued to be in dire health. Tony Stark was not completely human. His diminished heart continued to pump strongly, his lungs to take in air, and though bone did not regrow, his body easily accepted the titanium substitute and soon the only evidence of major surgery that could be found was a round scar in the exact shape of the arc reactor.

The debriefing of the Avengers on Tony's condition was put off until Natasha tattled on Fury to Coulson. The necessary paperwork to authorize a debriefing was slipped in between two lengthy and tediously dull reports which nonetheless needed the director's approval and signature, without which an obscure rule would be enacted which would cancel all new coffee shipments except for decaf. They also came with a note: '_Avengers avenger, sir_.'

Fury signed his approval and called the meeting. His only consolation was that Pepper Potts and her entourage stayed with Tony and Coulson wasn't actually physically available to attend. That still left a defrosted soldier with a kicked puppy expression, a man who could at any moment turn into a giant rage beast, two very capable substitutes for Coulson, and a god who was very likely about to become a diplomatic incident once he learned the extent of the deception. Thor had been the main reason he had been avoiding sharing his findings. That, and SHIELD was naturally paranoid when it came to secrets.

Fury decided to be fashionably late to the meeting. He had the doctor in charge of Tony's case sent instead, in the probably doomed hope that she could distract them by speaking medicalese. It didn't particularly work.

"So Loki turned him into a baby time lord?" Clint asked after the doctor tried to explain about the oddity of Tony's anatomy. They had pictures, including the pulverized heart. That folder had been closed rather quickly when Bruce's eyes had flashed green.

"Nay," Thor said, his voice strangely subdued. "He is like a child of my people."

"Your people are time lords?" Clint asked. Natasha gave him a look. It was her '_I know it's your coping method and I'm allowing it for now, but it's growing annoying and if you keep it up I will stab you_' look. Natasha could have very expressive looks when she wanted to. Or maybe that was just him.

"I am of the Aesir," Thor answered, "We do not have the two hearts of that noble warrior, the Doctor. We do, however, have backup heart valves and a regenerative healing factor."

Clint nodded as though he understood and then leaned over to whisper to Steve, "He does know Doctor Who is fictional, right?"

Steve ignored him. But if he hadn't been ignoring him, he'd probably have given him his '_Thor is from a different culture, not an idiot_' expression. Steve could be almost as good as Natasha when it came to expressions, especially ones that expressed disappointment.

"As far as we have been able to ascertain," the doctor said, "Tony Stark is part Aesir and part human. More Aesir than human. His DNA matches the records we have for Howard Stark, but there is no match with Maria Stark."

"So…Loki changed Tony's mother to one of Thor's people?" Steve asked.

"Please tell me Loki didn't make himself Tony's mom," Clint added. Around the table, people winced at the very idea.

"No," the doctor answered carefully. "There is a match we found for the…mother, and it is not Loki. Nor is it Thor. Or anyone else in this room, for that matter." Which led to shudders that came from an idea being disproven before they even thought to fear it but now couldn't help but imagine such an outcome.

"You have genetic records of my people?" Thor demanded, frowning.

"I wasn't given the details," the doctor answered defensively, "I only know that we did find a match in our database and that match was Aesir."

"So…" Steve tried to work this out, "Loki somehow made Tony part Aesir by using some DNA that SHIELD keeps on file?"

"No." a new voice answered, "Stark is part Aesir because around forty years ago Hydra was doing cloning experiments involving an alien that had crashed on our planet." Fury, with timing so perfect there was almost no way he hadn't been standing in the hallway waiting, marched in and tossed a file onto the table. "I think, just this once, Loki is mostly innocent."

"Innocent?" three different voices demanded at once, Steve and Clint with outrage and Thor with pleased surprise. Bruce continued his breathing exercise and didn't bother to say anything. Natasha ignored them all in favor of flipping through the folder. She barely glanced at the pictures, some of them nightmare inducing if she had bothered to dwell on them but not particularly relevant to the situation, and skimmed the reports until she came to something that was relevant.

"Howard Stark?" she asked, glancing towards Fury. With a grimace, Fury nodded.

"What?" Steve demanded, "What about Howard?" Fury didn't answer. Clint reached over and glanced at some of the pictures she'd bypassed, his face going pale and his eyes hard. Steve glanced over as well and blanched. Bruce very pointedly did not look at the pictures. Natasha kept reading, her face blank of all emotion. She paused again, looking up.

"Stark was sterile?"

While everyone was still trying to get their heads wrapped around the implications, Fury addressed the room.

"Around forty years ago, Howard and Maria Stark presented Anthony Edward Stark to the world. They told us he was two years old, and they had wanted to keep him away from the press as a baby. This was eight years after Howard Stark helped to close down Hydra's attempts at cloning."

"So…you're trying to say that Howard cloned himself to make Tony?" Steve tried, frowning.

"I'm saying that Howard completed Hydra's project using his own DNA to patch the faulty genetic material," Fury answered. "And then found a way to hide the alien bits and pass the result off as human, until Loki removed it."

The team stared at him.

"Excuse me," Bruce said, his voice eerily calm as he carefully stood and fled the room. Steve's expression was wounded.

"Tony is Aesir," Thor said. "And he's forty?"

"His records say he's thirty eight," the doctor offered.

"Unlikely," Natasha commented, still studying the contents of the folder. "I'd estimate his actual birthday to make him closer to forty three. Stark would have needed time to discover how to turn Tony completely human."

"I have been fighting alongside a forty year old child," Thor said, his hands clinching into fists. "I was not even allowed out of the nursery until I turned one hundred, and he has fought monsters."

"Can we change him back?" Steve asked. "Can we redo whatever Howard did and make him human again?"

Everyone except for Thor turned to look at the doctor. Thor stared at the table.

"I fix bodies," the doctor told them. "This isn't Hogwarts. I don't do curse removal."

It was while they were contemplating this that an unfortunate junior agent was pushed into the room. He looked around at the imposing figures around the table and backed up to hug against the wall.

"Director Fury, sir?" he said, standing stiffly at attention, "I've come to report that Loki has escaped, sir."

"WHAT?! And no one contacted me before because…?"

"All forms of communication seem to be temporarily blocked, sir. So were the alarms."

Five seconds later, alarms went off.

Five seconds after that, so did the sprinklers.

Fury was not having a good day.


	4. Chapter 4

Tony Stark opened his eyes. Loki was standing over him, staring. A voice that was far too high pitched to be himself shrieked and Tony reflexively threw the closest thing at hand at him. As this turned out to be a pillow it wasn't particularly effective, but somehow between twisting to grab the pillow and twisting back to throw it, Loki had vanished.

Tony sat up in the bed, his heart beating almost painfully hard in his chest, as he tried to make sense of the situation.

This wasn't his bedroom. For one, despite his various health issues, his bedroom wasn't full of medical apparatus. For another, usually by this point JARVIS would be speaking to him, reminding him where he was, and where he wasn't.

Had he been injured? He didn't feel injured, though his limbs were unaccountably heavy, his eyes still blinking away sleep. He didn't feel drugged, either. He felt…off. Like something was very, very wrong.

Pepper was lying in a nearby chair, her limbs slack, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Like someone who was dead.

Alarmed, Tony slid off the bed and toddled unsteadily to her side.

Something was very very wrong. Short jokes aside, he shouldn't have that far to go to reach the ground from the bed. Also, his entire sense of balance and body awareness was off, and the world around him had grown. Shoving the weirdness and wrongness aside for the moment, Tony managed to make it to Pepper's side without falling over and reached an unsteady hand for her pulse.

It took a couple of tries. It was like being drunk and trying to do that test of touching one's nose; his hand wasn't exactly where his brain seemed to think it should be. Pepper's heart was beating. She was breathing. She wasn't dead.

The relief almost made Tony burst into tears. He didn't, of course. He'd trained himself out of crying when his emotions were on overload years and years ago.

And now that he knew Pepper wasn't dead, it was getting harder to ignore the wrongness in his own body.

His hand was so tiny compared to Pepper's wrist. If it had just been Pepper, he'd have been tempted to say she had grown into a giant. It wouldn't be the first time that kind of oddity had happened. But Pepper fit in the giant chair, and there was also the giant bed, and the giant door and the giant machines. There was no reason for a giant Pepper to be put in a modified giant hospital room as a guest while Tony slept. Tony had shrunk.

If only he had just shrunk. Then he might be mocked for a bit by the others until they fixed it but he'd still, ultimately, be himself. His skin was too smooth, too new, too young for it to just be his height.

Not that his skin was unmarked. There were still faint scars, still calluses, but less hair, less muscle, less ravages from time. Tony studied his own hands, and then his bare feet, for a full minute before he gave in, took a deep breath, and lifted his hospital gown to check beneath.

That was very definitely not good. Though it could be worse. At least he still had certain body parts, however undeveloped said parts now were. He hadn't been turned into a girl as well as short. Just…

"I'm a kid," he said out loud, his voice startlingly high pitched. He dropped the gown and moved his hands carefully to his face, his spatial recognition already adapting to his new form and he easily ran his fingers over smooth skin. That was what he was expecting, of course. He'd have looked funny as a child with facial hair, anyway. He most definitely wasn't going to start crying over something like that. Just because he was a kid didn't mean he had to be a baby too.

Loki, he realized, this had to be Loki's fault. They had been battling him, hadn't they? And he had thrown something at Steve, and Tony had moved in the way. Turning the Avengers into defenseless kids seemed to be the sort of thing a god of mischief would do. And Loki had just been in his hospital room, too. To gloat? To cast this spell on an injured Tony? Try as he might, Tony couldn't remember the conclusion to the battle.

So, it must have been Loki, and they'd just need to find a way to turn Tony back and it'd all be fine. Were the other Avengers fine? Were they all children too, or injured, or worse? Loki had been after Steve, after all. He walked unsteadily to the door, determined to find Pepper help and discover what was going on.

And then suddenly alarms were going off. This was followed by the sprinkler.

"Wha… Tony!" Apparently a loud noise coupled with being doused by water was enough to break through whatever enchantment Loki had whammied her with. The door to the room flung open and Happy and Rhodey were there too, everyone's eyes turning to the empty bed first before they fell on Tony.

They were huge. If Pepper sitting in a chair had seemed big, two grown men were true giants. Tony had to crane his head upwards to get a view that wasn't crotch level. The fact that Rhodey's first protective instinct was to snatch Tony off the ground was unfortunate for everyone, considering that Tony's first instinct upon being picked up involved his foot going into a very sensitive location on Rhodey's body and ended with Tony falling, rolling into his landing, and taking out Happy at the knees.

When the alarm and sprinklers abruptly stopped, Pepper had the best view of Rhodey and Happy in a wet tangled heap, groaning in pain, with a tiny child sitting, dazed and befuddled but victorious, on top of them. Despite her shock, worry, and confusion, she still had the presence of mind to snap a photo.

"Tony?" Pepper said after she had taken the picture, her expression warring between amused, relieved, and terrified. It made Tony uncomfortable to look at her.

"Pepper," he said, trying not to wince at his own voice. "Are you hurt? Did Loki do anything to you?"

The noise she made was laughter, but it sounded very close to a sob.

Then the doctors showed up, wet and furious with the havoc the sprinklers and alarm had wrought on their entire ward, and horrified to find their critically ill patient not only awake but out of bed and unattached to the various machines he had been attached to.

"I'm fine," Tony tried to tell them, though he did allow Pepper to carry him back to the bed without inflicting further violence. His self-assessment might have been more convincing if he hadn't reflexively put his hand to his chest, feeling vulnerable as he did in front of all the strangers, and discovered a very vital part of himself to be missing completely. So he may have freaked out, just a tad. He may also have kicked the first doctor who came at him with a needle in the face. Luckily, he lacked shoes, not to mention the proper strength to break cartilage, though the nose bleed was still quite impressive.

The sudden arrival of the entire Avengers team did not help the situation.

In the end, one doctor was allowed to examine Tony with only Pepper present for moral support and Tony was declared miraculously cured. Not completely; there was still permanent damage to his heart and lungs that not even an Aesir could simply walk off, but he was not in need of a hospital bed either.

Tony's own debriefing to his condition felt surreal.

"You're saying my dad built me. In a lab. And then he turned me human. And Loki turned me back into an alien, the kind of alien that ages super slowly so even though I'm almost forty I look like this."

"Actually, we think you might be forty three," Clint offered helpfully. Tony stared at him. Then he looked at the others.

"And no one thinks this might just be another one of Loki's tricks, and he just made us all think it was my dad?"

The looks coming his way this time were far too pitying. Whatever. There was really only one thing Tony wanted to know at this point. "So how do we fix it?" he demanded. "How do we turn me human again?"

The silence of the others was getting uncomfortable now.

"It would be but an illusion," Thor said, breaking the silence, his voice impossibly gentle. "You would still be a child, just with an adult mask."

"I'm not a child!" Tony insisted, "I haven't been a child for decades!"

His point might have been better made if he hadn't stomped his foot at the same time. The others were looking decidedly uncomfortable. Pepper actually looked like she might start crying.

"Kids don't earn billions of dollars, or run companies, or fight villains!" Tony screamed at them. "They don't have sex, or drink, or…or…build robots!" And that last one was pretty flimsy considering how young Tony had been when he had built his first robot, but that wasn't the point. "I have responsibilities! I have a girlfriend! I have forty-three years of experience in life! I AM NOT A CHILD."

And then, taking a deep breath, because he was not going to throw a tantrum, he was not going to burst into tears, he was going to be mature and dignified, Tony announced "I'm going home."

And still barefoot and wearing a hospital gown, luckily not the kind that opened in the back, he calmly walked out of the room and down the hall, leaving a heavy silence in his wake.

"Well," Natasha said into the silence, "At least his personality hasn't changed."

"Shouldn't someone be going with him?" Steve asked. "I mean, I know he's still forty-three but he's also a minor." Everyone looked at each other. Then they all looked at Pepper. With a sigh, she did go to the door and look out, but stopped almost at once. Tony was nowhere in sight.

"Can you not follow the path of a child?" Thor asked the two resident spies. Natasha and Clint made no move to run out the door.

"I don't know," Natasha said, "Children are tiny. I think we will have to report to Fury that we lost his asset. Those scientists will just have to find a different alien clone to play with."

"Wait, what?!" Steve demanded.

"There was a whole debriefing," Clint said, "It was a thing. About how dangerous it could be if Stark fell into the wrong hands. And we were ordered under no circumstances were we to smuggle him out of the building. So, as you can see, here we are, not smuggling Tony out of the building."

"He would dare hold an Aesir child captive?!" Thor boomed.

"And let's not forget, do painful experiments on an Aesir child," Clint agreed. With a growl, Thor stomped off in the general direction of Fury's office. The others watched him go with a mixture of satisfaction and concern. Then they turned their attention once again to the missing child.

"Do you think Stark will actually get out of the building?" Natasha asked.

"Twenty bucks says he gets to the deck and stops," Clint answered. "He can't fit in his suits and he's too short to drive. Anyway, he's two feet tall and dressed like a hospital escapee. How far is he going to get like that?"

Half an hour later, they got a call from a police officer. Apparently, they had pulled over a speeding car to discover the driver was a toddler wearing an oversized black shirt like a dress who had somehow rigged the pedals and thought kneeling in the driver's seat was a good alternative to not being able to see over the wheel.

Pepper won the bet.


	5. Chapter 5

The first thing Tony does when he is finally alone, in his own room in his own home, is to study his new reflection in his full length mirror.

It isn't just being a child that has changed. His eyes aren't his eyes.

It makes no sense, really. Thor's eyes look human. Loki's eyes look human. Tony's eyes look…unnatural. They aren't his mom's eyes anymore. None of him belongs to him mom anymore. If there is anything about this entire business that upsets him the most, worse even than the loss in height, the loss in respect, the loss in functional adult parts, it is the loss of his mom. It's like she died all over again. Like she was never his in the first place.

It isn't that his eyes are completely wrong now. They aren't slit like a cat's or upside down or anything like that. Mainly, it's that they aren't brown anymore. They're purple. A very deep purple, that mostly comes across as black, which is creepy enough, and then the light glints on them just right and they're actually purple. Who has purple eyes?

They're also impossibly huge, but that probably has more to do with his change in age than his change in biology.

He looks…twee. Elfin. His ears are even pointed, just the slightest bit. And he is so tiny, skinny, the majority of his hard earned muscle mass simply gone overnight. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have muscles; for a toddler he's positively bulked up, but compared to his adult self he looks emaciated. He also thinks a buzzcut would go a long way in undermining the faerie look because at the moment he has tufts of dark hair highlighting his face in a way that somehow makes him look delicate and otherworldly and young. He can't quite bring himself to make that kind of fashion choice though; buzz cuts are just too military to suit him.

The scar where the arc reactor used to be is disturbing, not least because it is obvious that it took up much more of his chest as a child than it had when he was an adult. He didn't even want to imagine what having it in his chest had done to him when he had shrunk down. It didn't hurt anymore, though the scar was fresh and it looked like it should. It felt wrong that it didn't hurt. It wasn't just that it should hurt after such an intensive surgery. It was that his chest used to always hurt. It was almost as strange to not be in pain anymore as it was to be a child. The arc reactor, even on a good day, had made its presence known, as had the shrapnel. Now it was gone.

He didn't really look too closely at his new, immature private parts. He knew they were his, but he still felt a bit like a pervert studying a kid's parts, and he didn't even want to know what Pepper was currently feeling about their entire relationship. So he skipped that and took in the general lack of hair on his legs and how tiny his feet looked, even to himself.

Tony allowed himself a full five minutes to study his new reflection before he pulled on one of his old shirts, one that had been adapted to hide the arc reactor's light. For some reason, he felt better being able to imagine it hidden, rather than gone.

"JARVIS," he said, "Order me a full wardrobe in whatever the hell size I am now."

"Of course, sir," JARVIS's voice responded at once, and thank goodness his AI had accepted Tony as he was, because there had been a very good chance he might have taken the changes in Tony's appearance, in his very DNA, and decided this was an intruder. "Do you have any preferences?"

"You know the sort of things I like," Tony answered, because no matter what Natasha had said about narcissism, he was not going to sit there and dictate the details for his entire new wardrobe. Especially since it was a temporary wardrobe, because they were going to fix this. "Some of everything, formal and casual."

He regretted that later, when he unwrapped the Captain America pajamas and matching underwear. For the moment, however, he was simply glad that at least one person was accepting his instructions as though he were an adult and while he waited for his new wardrobe he tried to make himself as dignified as one can be when one's outfit consists entirely of a single item which threatens to slip down one's shoulders and trip one's feet.

Then he went to the tower's common room because he was most definitely not hiding in his room like a sulking kid. The entire team was waiting for him, and trying to pretend they weren't. Except for Thor, of course. He stood when Tony walked in and smiled at him.

"Tony," he said, "You have returned." And that…that right there was wrong. Thor didn't call him Tony. It was always 'Man of Iron' or 'Starkson' or 'Comrade' or something else that made Tony feel like he was in a Renaissance fair. It was never Tony.

"We need to do some shopping," Pepper said, eying his wardrobe choice with distaste, "JARVIS, can you order…"

"No need," Tony said quickly, because unlike him, Pepper would dictate exactly what she thought he should wear. "Already taken care of. I had JARVIS order a full wardrobe. ETA, JARVIS?"

"The majority of your wardrobe will arrive within the hour. Your suits should be available for a fitting within the next week."

"Right," Pepper said, "Of course."

Then no one seemed to know what to say. Tony stared at his friends. They tried to stare back without being obvious that they were staring. Tony opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.

"Whatever," he said at last. "I need a drink. Anyone else want something?"

And he marched over to his bar and tried to pretend he wasn't making his drink choices based upon what was in reach of his tiny body. Stools, he thought to himself. He needed JARVIS to order lots of stools. Or maybe he could rig something up in the lab, something that hovered that he could make go up or down. He also pretended that he wasn't waiting for someone to stop him, to tell him that kids can't drink alcohol, that they had the right to stop him.

"I would partake in a beverage with you, friend Tony!" Thor announced eagerly.

"Um…" Steve said.

"Should we be allowing baby Stark to drink alcohol?" Clint asked.

"Probably not," Bruce answered, sounding surprisingly laid back and relaxed. Or perhaps not so surprising. When Bruce knew he was going to be facing a stressful situation he had a tendency to disappear for a bit to do what he called meditation but what Tony rather suspected was a euphemism for something else. At any rate, Tony carefully never asked exactly what plants Bruce was growing in his little garden.

Thor and Tony ignored them as Tony prepared two glasses. In honor of his newfound childhood, Tony included little umbrellas. He pulled out a mostly empty bottle of wine, which was one of the few things in his reach he was fairly certain his weakling arms weren't going to accidently spill or drop, and waited for Thor to comment, but Thor made no move to stop Tony and seemed perfectly content to drink with him. In the end, it was Steve who cautiously approached the two.

"Um…Thor?" he said.

"Yes, Friend Steve? Have you come to share a drink with us?"

"…no thank you. Um…is it normal for kids to drink alcohol on Asgard?"

"What else would they drink?" Thor asked.

"…milk?"

"Alcohol is detrimental to a human child's development," Bruce explained calmly. "Can I have a glass too, Tony?"

"Good thing I'm mostly Aesir then, and not human," Tony remarked, taking a sip of his own drink and showing off his remarkable maturity by not sticking his tongue out at Steve before he grabbed a glass for Bruce. The taste was the same as he remembered, as was the burn.

"Mostly Aesir is not the same thing as all Aesir," Bruce pointed out. Tony gave him a green umbrella for his drink. This time he did stick his tongue out.

"Well, we'll just have to run some tests to see what the effect of alcohol is on this body," Tony said. He drained his glass, waited a second, then thoughtfully brought his finger to his nose, just managing to poke his left nostril. Nope, not drunk. He grabbed the bottle and started to pour himself a second glass.

"Tony," Pepper said, in that tone of voice that meant she intended to put a stop to whatever fun Tony was getting up to. It was her 'I'm very disappointed in how you're acting' tone.

"I want a pink umbrella," Natasha announced.

In the end, everyone except for Steve had a glass. They finished emptied the rest of the bottle and opened a new one. No one got drunk. Tony didn't go back for a third glass. Somehow, the fact that no one was snatching his glass out of his hand lessened his need to drink it in the first place. Besides, he knew better than to press his luck. No one was stopping him yet.

"We need to go shopping for baby Stark," Clint decided, after they had convened to a pillow fort on the ground. Tony had nothing to do with making it. That was all Bruce and Clint.

"I did my shopping already," Tony pointed out from inside his pillow cave. He wondered, vaguely, where the pillow with the pink hearts came from. He was fairly certain there had been nothing of the kind on any of the chairs or sofas in the entire tower. Not that he cared where it came from; it was his now. It was comfy.

"Clothes, yeah," Clint answered, "But what about other stuff. You know, toys. Kids got to have toys. And babyproofing. Can't have you running into things or drowning yourself in the toilet."

Tony's aim was off and his pillow fell just short of the archer. Natasha's was dead on and with slightly more force than a playful throw would be.

"Ow! Nat, what the hell?"

"Language," Steve said, and then started to blush when the others looked at him.

Tony drank the rest of his wine and cuddled his new pillow and most definitely did not imagine drowning.

"Where did my pillow go?" Thor demanded. "It bears red hearts to represent the great love of my beloved Jane!"

Tony cuddled his new pillow tighter.

"Excuse me, sir," JARVIS announced. "The wardrobe has arrived. I've instructed that it be inserted in the elevator."

Tony thought he should be excited about that. Walking around in an oversized shirt was getting a bit old, after all. Being a kid was getting old, too. There had to be a way to redo whatever it was his dad did. If his dad could figure it out, then so could Tony.

Instead of jumping up and running to the elevator, Tony stayed huddled in his pillow fort, cuddling the ridiculously comfy pillow to his chest. Moving seemed like too much of a bother. Inside the pillow fort, Tony didn't feel small and childish. From that angle he couldn't even see how much bigger his teammates were than him. Inside the pillow fort, with two glasses of wine swimming through his system, he felt just on the edge of normal.

"You coming, Tony?" Pepper asked. Tony didn't answer. If he answered, he'd break the illusion. His voice wouldn't be his voice. Just for that moment, he didn't want to face any of it. Also, it turned out that two glasses of wine made him incredibly sleepy.

By the time the boxes of his new things had been dragged inside, Tony had fallen asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

"Let's see, we have one _Stark's Secret Son_, one _Avenger Discovers Fountain of Youth, witness interview inside_, and my personal favorite, _Tony and Loki's Secret Alien Love Child_. Of course, the Daily Bugle is going with '_Spiderman Terrorizes Elderly_' apparently by rescuing the woman's purse from a purse snatcher in an unsuitably startling fashion, but I did get a mention on page 2: _Stark's Seclusion Continues_. So no mention…oh wait, the reporter speculates babysitting duty. So another 'new son' theory. What is that now…eighteen news sources think I'm my own kid, three somehow got hold of the mysterious witness who apparently saw me turn into a child, and the usual number that suggest I'm having affairs with Loki, Captain America, Natasha, or the entire Avenger's team."

"If you didn't want people thinking you had a kid, you shouldn't have run off and gotten yourself arrested by trying to drive a car," Pepper pointed out, sounding just the slightest bit harassed. Considering it was her who was having to deal with the press, not to mention the board, and really not to mention how she was handling her past relationship with a current minor, she probably had reason to be.

"Excuse you, but I think you'll find 'succeeding at driving' is what I was doing," Tony answered. "It's not my fault the cops took exception to seeing a car go by where they couldn't see the driver."

"So what exactly am I going to tell people at the upcoming press conference?" Pepper demanded, somehow managing to sound professional and not at all like she was having an important business conversation with a child. It helped that she already had years of experience in babysitting Tony; she just had to get used to the new voice and the new height and try not to think too hard on her memories of their more intimate moments and thus far she was holding herself together surprisingly well.

"Well not the son thing. They'll want to know what I did with him when I grow myself up. Just go with the truth," Tony answered, who had also been holding himself together surprisingly well, though that, she suspected, was because he had thus far put all his efforts into 'fixing' it. So far unsuccessfully, but he was convinced that all he needed to do was to find out what his dad did and he could be himself again and pretend the child thing had never happened. Thor's words suggested it wasn't that simple and Pepper really really could not think too hard on the 'boy' part of her 'boyfriend' or she thought she might be sick. Tony had yet to bring up their relationship, but he probably intended to carry on with it just as soon as he was 'adult' enough. Whether that could happen or not, Pepper had to concentrate on what she could deal with, and one of those things was the press.

"The truth?" she asked, trying to sound skeptical rather than like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "That your dad cloned himself and mixed his DNA with an alien to create you and then used alien technology to make you seem human which Loki's magic disrupted?"

"That the god of mischief zapped me and I'm stuck in this kid body," Tony answered. That made sense, especially since it was mostly the truth, except…

"I don't know, Tony. Letting people know that Iron Man is...I mean, that he seems…vulnerable…"

"Iron Man is still in action," Tony said quickly. "And the entire Avengers team is living here."

"Remote piloting isn't really the same thing, and…"

"And people already suspect. If they aren't coming after me for me, next you'll have people after this mysterious 'son' I seem to have acquired. Besides, billionaire, genius, crime fighter…there's always going to be a reason for them to come after me, Pep. They haven't gotten me yet."

Pepper just looked at him, because that wasn't entirely true and they both knew it. Sure, no one had succeeded in the long run, but gotten him they had. And as much as Tony didn't want to admit it, refused to admit it, he was more vulnerable like this. He didn't have an Iron Man suit that fit, or Iron Boy as Clint liked to suggest, and so far the size constraints were making the creation of a mini suit difficult. Besides, most of his great intellect had been turned towards making himself big again, not how to live as a child, because learning how to live as a child meant admitting that was what he was, and Tony was nowhere near ready to do that.

He was also more of a target just for his genetics. At least Steve and Thor and Bruce, all who were similar targets, were also big enough to be intimidating, big enough to fight off would be kidnappers. Tony's smaller body would be so easy to kidnap; he could be picked up, tossed around, stuffed into a box and carried, disappeared.

The look Tony was giving her now was way too old for his young face, far too knowing. That was one of the greatest oddities about dealing with Tony the child: as an adult he had always come off as extremely immature; the exact same behavior from a child made him seem far too mature.

"I will fix this, Pep," Tony insisted, his eyes almost pleading with her to agree. "I won't be a kid forever."

"No, you won't," Pepper answered. Of course he wouldn't, though not in the way he meant. Children do grow up in the end. She just wasn't sure she'd still be alive then. And there was another aspect of the entire situation she tried not to think about.

The rest of the team were dealing with fun-sized Tony with various amounts of success. In some ways, Thor was the most successful, in that he best understood from personal experience what it was like being a forty year old Aesir. He was used to children who looked barely out of toddlerhood who could hold an intelligent conversation that included sarcasm or abstract reasoning, but who still needed a hand navigating social situations and needed the same boundaries as any human child to rein in their impulse control issues and emotional immaturity.

"I'm sorry, friend Tony," he had a way of saying that never sounded condescending, "But I must intrude upon your work. A meal has been prepared for us above."

"I'm not finished!" Tony generally answered in a tone that in his four year old voice suggested he was seconds away from a screaming melt down. This was usually followed by a look that just dared Thor to treat him like a child and insist Tony stop and come to dinner.

"Our friend Bruce has labored long and hard upon this meal," Thor would answer instead. "I believe we should honor his efforts with our presence." That had a fifty-fifty chance of working, both because guilt was a surprisingly strong lever when it came to Tony and because Tony genuinely liked Bruce's cooking. Plus, by this point in the conversation Tony had usually paused long enough to suddenly realize he was truly hungry.

On the other hand, Thor wasn't used to a child who had, up to this point, considered himself an adult, and a middle aged adult at that. Nor was he used to a child who was raised in a human culture. And while Aesir children were smart for their size, that was due to their greater experience than human children, not to greater intelligence. Tony was still a genius.

When Tony was seriously not ready to stop working and wasn't going to allow Thor to persuade him (particularly likely if it was Clint's turn to cook), he didn't dissolve into the threatened meltdown as an Aesir child might. Nor did appealing to his honor shame him in the same way it might an Aesir child. Tony did as he had done when he still looked like an adult; he'd repeat that he couldn't stop yet, possibly babble a bunch of science at the person by way of explanation, and then he'd ignore whoever was intruding. Thor always seemed a bit at a loss what to do when a child wasn't obeying but also wasn't exactly misbehaving.

Steve had no problem seeing Tony as a misbehaving little punk, considering that's pretty much how he saw him when he was an adult, but he had a harder time remembering that Tony was also older than he looked.

"And you can sit there for four minutes," Steve said in exactly the same sort of tone he got when Tony used to misbehave in the field. Tony stared up at him in disbelief from the chair Steve had plopped him down in.

"Seriously?" he asked, and he tried to hide the smidgeon of relief he had felt when he realized that what Steve meant by 'face the consequences' wasn't an actual spanking. Considering the time period Steve came from, it had been a legitimate worry to cross Tony's mind. Forget a few embarrassing swats on his bottom, Tony had been mentally preparing for Steve to pull out a belt.

"No talking," Steve answered sternly.

"Yeah…no," Tony said. "Like this is going to happen."

With patience that would have made Super Nanny proud, Steve faced off with Tony for a solid three hours, returning him to his chair every time Tony removed himself from it. At one point, Tony literally waited until the timer was down to two seconds before deliberately standing back up just before it rang.

The face-off finally ended when Clint came in, saw them at it, and asked if he could play what was obviously some mix of tag and hide and seek too.

"This isn't a game!" Steve answered. "Tony is being very naughty and he needs to sit his time in time out."

Tony, who had started off feeling a mixture of outrage and mortification, had by this point actually been having fun. He'd wait for Steve to get far enough away, then bolt and try to find a new unreachable place to hide from Steve. Sometimes he'd be grabbed too quickly to make it. Sometimes Steve would have to spend several minutes trying to find him. So far, Tony's record for keeping out of Steve's reach was fourteen minutes and twenty-six seconds. It would have been more but Tony had made up his own rules in his head, such as that he wouldn't leave the common rooms of the tower, he couldn't hide someplace Steve physically couldn't reach, and he couldn't use the same spot twice.

"Tag!" Tony shouted, slapping Clint's leg. "You're it!"

"And why was Tony in time out?" Clint asked after he had made an impressive leap over the sofa and now had Tony dangling from his ankles. Tony made an effort to behave in a dignified manner and not to giggle like an actual four year old at being upside down.

"I told him to pick up his tools. They were all over the living room where anyone could step on them! And he used rude language."

"That's because Capcycle's a condescending little sh…" Tony started to explain his side when Clint flipped him right side up in the air and he left off in what could only be described as an excited shriek of pure happiness.

"Well come on, rapscallion, and pick up your toys before Bruce steps on one and finishes them off. And Steve, if you are going to do time outs, be fair. Assign us all time outs when we're out of line, not just Tony."

Clint, surprisingly, was rather good at dealing with Tony. Most of the time, Tony got the impression that Clint was using Tony's new age as an excuse to play himself. All sorts of toys showed up around the tower, some an obvious joke, like when the set of toddler diapers appeared with the Avengers theme, but some Clint definitely wanted for himself, like the nerf guns. And some Tony actually used. Like the various building toys. And maybe the racecars. Secretly. Because he didn't need toys.

Clint being good with kids didn't mean that Tony was going to put up with him, though.

"I'm not done using them!" Tony answered, ignoring that he had just spent the better part of three hours not using his tools.

"Fine," Clint answered. "And when the Hulk comes out, you can just spend your 'time out' with him. Being cuddled. It's up to you."

Which was completely unfair and underhanded tactics, not least because that was totally true. Tony did not want to spend another hour being cuddled by an overprotective rage monster who was convinced baby Tony had no self-preservation skills whatsoever. It wasn't fair. Bruce, his science bro who generally treated Tony more or less like he always had, catches him just one time on the top of a precarious tower he'd cobbled together to reach a high shelf, and suddenly the Hulk felt the need to appear and spend his time out protectively cuddling Tony for a good hour.

In the end, Tony did clear up his tools, because he was a mature sort of person who does that and not because he was told to by Steve. Then he pretended it was his choice to eat because he was hungry and not because Natasha came and told him it was time. Just like he pretended that he wasn't constantly being watched by someone, even if it was just to casually stick their head in his lab from time to time, because he wasn't really four.

They had actually tried to use JARVIS as a babysitter to begin with. As if JARVIS wasn't Tony's through and through. Using JARVIS as a baby monitor lasted about two hours before Pepper learned about it and told them all off for lapse of sanity.

Tony didn't need a babysitter anyway. He wasn't four. He was thirty-eight, or forty-three, or anyway, he was too old for time outs and too old for enforced meal times and bedtimes and he was too old for constant supervision.

And he was so close to figure out what his dad did so he could change himself back. Then everything could be the way it was before, no matter what Thor said. Until then, he'd just have to put up with everything. Just a little while more.


End file.
